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JANUARY MEETING TO HOST LOCAL RAILROAD OFFICIALS The January meeting of the Pacific Northwest Chapter, National Railway Historical Society will be held on Friday, January 28th (This is a change in the meeting date since our guests will be attending a meeting of their own on our regular meeting night) The meeting will be held at 8:00 pm at the Fire Hall NW, 3rd & Glisan. Our special guests will be Mr. N.S. Westergard, VicePresident and General Manager of the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Ry. and John G. Melonos, assistant to the general manager of the SP&S. Also present will be William Crosbie, head of passenger department of the SP&S, and PNW member Jack Jones, manager of the Portland Terminal Railroad Company (NPT). Several other railroad officials have been invited but at this writing none have answered. The meeting will feature a slide show by Clayton Snyder of Lincolnwood, IL, a delegate to the 1965 Convention in Portland. The slide show is titled “Convention as seen by a delegate” For those who worked at the convention this is a chance to see on film how busy you were and how everything worked out. The local railroad officials, without who’s cooperation the convention would not have been a success, will get a chance to see what their work accomplished also. Refreshments will be served. An invitation has been extended to Tacoma Chapter members to attend. We are expecting a good turnout of local members, so don’t disappoint us. FROM THE EDITORS DESK AGAIN Getting out a paper is no picnic. If we print jokes, people say we are silly. If we clip things from other paper, we are too lazy to write them ourselves. If we don’t print every word of all contributions we don’t appreciate genius. If we print them, the columns are filled with junk. If we make a change in the other fellow’s writing, we are too critical. If we don’t we are blamed for poor editing. Now, probably someone will say we lifted this from some other sheet. We did! Seriously. As was announced at the last meeting, there are a few conditions connected with my being editor for one more year. Being in the last year of college, I don’t have the time necessary to devote to the Trainmaster which I would like to have, therefore the content for next years Trainmaster will be what the member’s submit. If nothing comes in then the Trainmaster will be just a meeting notice. As you can see, this month’s Trainmaster is bigger than usual because the response from members has been excellent. Also we hope to resume photos, along with some small quizzes such as the one on reporting marks in this issue. I can’t read all the newspapers, so cut out an interesting articles and send them in, it may be one I didn’t see. My special thanks this month to Jack Norton for the press work, and Jack Holst, Miln Gillespie, and our Canadian reporter Bob Gevert, secretary of the West Coast Railway Association, for this months news. OLD CAR MOTOR WANTED FOR SPEEDER A Brooks-Scanlon speeder owned by several PNW members and now kept at the Trolley Park is in need of a motor. If anyone has an old car motor they may wish to donate or sell cheap, should be a six cylinder- Ford or Plymouth/Dodge, please contact Jack Holst. BAD WEATHER HITS RAILROADS ONCE MORE The Christmas Week floods of last year were once more remembered when bad weather hit Oregon’s railroads again this year. Minor flooding and slides were reported by several railroads with Southern Pacific getting the worst of it. The Cascade was cancelled 3 days because of the slides on the line and extreme snow fall over southern Oregon and northern California. The Union Pacific’s Kent branch which was hard hit by last years floods will not be rebuilt. All stranded cars were hauled out by trucks to the mainline. Car movement on the isolated sections was accomplished by several small industrial switchers which were trucked into the tracks. THE YAKUTAT & SOUTHERN RAILROAD By E.M. McCracken If you’ve never heard of the Yakutat & Southern Railroad, it is not surprising. It is not one of the world’s best known railroads and a great many people, both in Alaska and out, are totally ignorant of this road, which has a name almost as long as its tracks. Here are some of the Yakutat & Southerns outstanding features, unique, but for the most part unenvied by other roads: It is perhaps the only railroad in the country that was built for the exclusive purpose of carrying raw fish. It has been carrying fish, and not much else in the way of pay load, for very nearly sixty years. As a result, the railroad operates only during the fishing season in the summer. This lasts three months out of the year, at the very most. The railroad’s main line starts on a cannery wharf and ends eleven miles in the brush on an uninhabited river bank. The Yakutat & Southern may be the only railroad in the world that runs by the moon rather than the sun. Its schedule is geared to the time of high tide on the Situk River. That is the end of the line, where it picks up its cargo of fish, and the fish scow can only unload there at high tide. Passengers and their effects ride free on this road. There are no tickets you get on and go, if you have the nerve. Some of the world’s most magnificent mountain scenery is visible from the train, but few of the passengers look at it. They are too busy watching for a soft spot to land in the event the train jumps the track, which it does frequently. Yakutat is a fishing town on Yakutat Bay at the extreme northwest corner of the Alaska Panhandle. It was one of the most isolated places in Alaska at one time. In 1903, F.S. Stimson of Seattle and some associates incorporated the Stimson Lumber Co. and the Yakutat & Southern Railroad, with the announced intention of operating a salmon cannery, a sawmill, a railroad, and a general store. They did all four, but the railroad and sawmill seem to come first, the former to haul in the lumber to build the cannery, wharves and other necessary structures. The sawmill have a capacity of 30,000 board feet a day, and an adjacent planing mill could turn out 5,000 ft. a day. Once the cannery got into operation, which was in the season of 1904, the sawmill turned out shooks for the wooden cases in which the cans were packed in those years. The original company carried on the operation for a number of years. Then it was taken over by the Gorman & Company, which had a number of salmon canneries in Southeast Alaska. In 1913 it was sold to Libby, McNeill and Libby, the big Chicago food packing firm which also had a string of Alaska canneries. The present owners, Bellingham Canning Company, bought the property from Libby in 1951. During all these years the Yakutat & Southern has puffed, chugged and groaned back and forth each summer between Yakutat and Situk, carrying fishermen and their boats and gear to the river and returning with salmon. There have been some changes in the rolling stock as the years went by, and in the line itself. In the early days there was a seven-mile branch to Lost River, but was abandoned when the automobile took its place. The Yakutat & Southern is a standard gauge road, and the original motive power was a Heisler geared locomotive that was said to have been discarded by the New York Elevated Railroad when the line was electrified. The Heisler proved unsuited to the need of the Y & S and was scrapped-its bell now rings at the company mess hall (See comment by our Heisler expert Jack Holst at end of article) Its place was taken by a Lima 2-6-2 of the cabbage-stack variety so common to western logging railroads. At some early date the company acquired a wooden, open platform coach built by the now long defunct Hollingsworth Company of Wilmington, Delaware. In it passengers on the Y&S road in comparative style and comfort in years gone by. What is left of the coach now stands in the weedgrown and unused yard along with the remains of a couple of flat cars, some gondola cars, a pair of nearly disintegrated Plymouth switch engines, and the remains of a nineteen thirtyish Packard flanged-wheel sedan. An economy drive following World War II spelled the end of service for the Lima. It burned two tons of coal on the round trip to the Situk and was retired about 1949 in favor of a make-shift steeple jack-type gas engine using the wheels of the old Heisler. Both this contrivance and the Lima now sit rusting in the engine house. Today the line’s operating rolling stock consists of a Chevrolet truck with flanged wheels and a big box on the back plus a home made bogy-type gondola. Almost anyone around the cannery who can drive a truck and swing a sledge is likely to be engineer. Howard Trissel handled the trottle on one of my two excursion, Guy Mallott’s son, the mayor of Yakutat, on the other. We left on one trip at about ten-thirty in the morning.

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